Some of the lunch crowd was still lingering in the Southampton Publick House dining room on Friday's frosty mid-afternoon. Open daily year round for lunch, dinner, and Sunday brunch, the expansive eatery, known for decades as Herb McCarthy's just north of Southampton Village, is the brainchild and so-far-successful enterprise of four Sullivan brothers who reopened it last June as a family-style restaurant and microbrewery.

Kevin, formerly of the Doral hotel group, runs the front of the house. Jim manages the brewery operation (the first such on the East End), producing eight different beer styles at any one time with names like Water Mill Wheat and Pumpkin Ale. And Charlie, who at 40 is a retired New York City policeman, acts as "aide du jour."

The words are Don's, at 35 the youngest of the four - and the chef. "We all bring different things to the table," Mr. Sullivan said, and "it's amazing we all get along." He cited as their common goal "the house, first."

Estimating that the restaurant served roughly 450 dinners on a "reasonable" Saturday night during the summer, Mr. Sullivan said he kept his eye on "affordability - a major component" for a "viable year-round entity."

"We all have children and have to think of the family budget," he acknowledged, reviewing an eclectic menu where the highest-priced appetizer is Maryland crab cakes with re mou lade sauce for $7, and the top entree is a $20 20-ounce Black Angus T-bone steak.

His menu "changes with the solstice and the equinox," he said, and emphasizes not only local but seasonal ingredients. Among the offerings of "winter dinner fare," for instance, is a salad of winter greens with a walnut vinaigrette, and a pasta, orecchiette, served with broccoli rabe and Italian sausage. A hearty pan-roasted loin of pork is accompanied by a wheat ale mustard sauce.

Mr. Sullivan said he asked Harry Ludlow, a Bridgehampton farmer who supplies the restaurant's potatoes, to begin growing hops for the restaurant this spring. The beers, said the chef, are "an accent" to the menu, not "a star," adding that in northern European countries such as England, Belgium, and Germany the beverage has been a traditional component of the cuisine.

Born and raised in Floral Park, Mr. Sullivan, who now lives in Hampton Bays, has been coming to the East End for 18 years.

"I have an affinity for cooking," he said. "I like it." Before opening the Publick House, he was the chef and operating partner at Rip Tide on the Shinnecock Canal near Hampton Bays for three years. Before that he worked at the Yorkville Brewery and Tavern on the Upper East Side.

He earned a bachelor's degree in economics and business from St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights in 1983, and in 1989 received a master's in hotel and restaurant management from the New School For Social Research. He "walked to work" while earning his master's, he said, earning his keep as the chef at J.P. Lofland's New York Grill on Fifth Avenue and 21st Street.

Mr. Sullivan supervises a total staff of 25, including six in the kitchen who serve up a stew of chicken, lentil, and parsnip - a "great winter dish that has been well received," he said.

Among all the pageantry and hoopla over the Inauguration, one familiar Long Island name that hasn't been in the news for a while kept popping up.

Remember wonder boy Thomas J. Downey, who was elected to the Suffolk Legislature at 22 and became a U.S. Representative, the youngest in Congress, six years later? The apple-cheeked youth from Amityville, who is in his mid-40s now, lost his Second District seat to Rep. Rick Lazio, a Republican, a few years ago in the aftermath of the House scandal involving overdrafts on the Congressional bank, but he is clearly still to be reckoned with as a player on the national political field.

Mr. Downey, it seems, has become a Washington insider, an "eternal Democratic enthusiast," according to The New York Times, who is counted among the members of Vice President Gore's "inner circle." Somewhere along the way, he also appears to have picked up the art of speaking in neat sound bites, a talent that will surely stand him in good stead with his party as the millennial election approaches.

"Inaugural parties are like love-ins, without the love," Mr. Downey told The Times, meaning that for thousands of Capitol Hill bureaucrats, office seekers, and networking lobbyists like himself, the weekend's galas, culminating in Monday night's 14 inaugural balls, were more work than play.

Asked by another reporter to say a few words about the Vice President, the front runner for the Democratic nomination in 2000, Mr. Downey was concise. "The salad days are over," he snapped.

Does ex-Congressman Downey sound like he's auditioning for a larger role on the Washington stage - one close, perhaps, to the star of the show? Don't forget, you read it here first.

When the Parrish Art Museum arranges a program for local students, it doesn't mean a guided gallery tour or classes in kite-making. It means having them spend a year and a half preparing to mount an ambitious, full-scale museum exhibit.

This is the fourth such partnership between the museum and South ampton High School, and the result is a deeply researched exhibit on the impact of World War II on American art and culture. Called "Dark Images, Bright Prospects: The Survival of the Figure After World War II," it will open at the Parrish on Feb. 9.

The decade following World War II was notable for an unsettling dichotomy: unbounded optimism and economic growth at war's end offset by fear of nuclear destruction and Communism and growing unease about racial division in America. This duality affected the artists of the period, who were already torn by the art world's own division between the figurative and the abstract.

Behind The Scenes

Some 50 high school students were involved in this year's project, according to the school's social studies coordinator, Joseph O'Donnell. They worked on two levels, one meeting their social studies requirements and the other a purely voluntary one.

Students chose the areas that interested them, with computer fiends loading information to produce a catalogue, for instance. Some interviewed Southampton residents who had been alive and working in various fields in the decade following the war, and one group worked on making the exhibit accessible to primary school children.

Students on an artifacts committee traveled to museums and galleries to select works to be exhibited, while others worked on music and filming.

"They really appreciated the chance to go behind the scenes and meet museum experts that the general public wouldn't have," said Mr. O'Donnell.

Living Room/Bomb Shelter

In addition to the exhibit of work by leading artists of the time, the show will feature personal memory albums, photographs, newspaper headlines, and "Visions of Optimism," a room furnished with a Charles Eames chair and sofa and other design elements of the era.

In striking contrast will be "Visions of Pessimism," a recreation of a bomb shelter complete with sandbags, stacked canned goods, a government propaganda film, and a recorded announcement of what to do in case of nuclear attack.

Mr. O'Donnell stressed that while the students were involved in every process of the exhibit, they were closely supervised all the way.

Among the people the students got to meet, Mr. O'Donnell said, was the world-renowned exhibit designer Ralph Applebaum (the Holocaust Museum is among his credits). The students visited his studio in Manhattan, and Mr. Applebaum himself came out to Southampton to work with them at the Parrish.

Also involved in the project were such noteworthies as the economist Robert Heilbroner and Morris Dickstein, a historian and director of the Center for the Humanities at City University. Sandra Kraskin, curator and art historian at the Museum of Modern Art, treated students to a special visit there.

Come Feb. 9, the public will get a major museum show. The students, to whom World War II must seem as distant as the Napoleonic Wars, have had the past brought to life for them in a way that no history book could ever do. They have also had a lesson in practical, hands-on organization and the satisfaction of an end result that will be seen not just by parents in the gymnasium, but by the world at large.

We are reminded again this week of how large a debt the community owes the volunteers in our fire departments. On Friday evening, as the wind-chill hovered near zero, two fires in Montauk, one quite serious, the other much less so, brought firefighters into the cold not only from Montauk but from Amagansett, East Hampton, and Springs.

While the fires were commanding full attention, and the Montauk ambulance was bringing one motel resident to the hospital, another four ambulances were called out in quick succession to aid persons in distress in East Hampton, Springs, and Sag Harbor. Easily hundreds of fire and ambulance personnel were on the job in difficult circumstances. An East Hampton Village dispatcher said Friday was one of the busiest nights he'd ever had. And the calls continued, even though it is the dead of winter, all weekend long.

Few of us like to dwell on the thought that someday it may be us on the receiving end of the volunteers' effort and skill, but we know no one is immune to misfortune. Now is as good a time as any to say "thank you."

January is a wonderful month. Lawns and gardens need not be tended and outdoor work can be deferred until spring. Seed catalogue orders were mailed off in December; there's nothing left to do now but wait.

Bird-watchers, snug indoors, can feel virtuous while studying their field guides. The Christmas counts have come and gone.

No one need feel guilty about not jogging or biking. The days are short and cold; the nights long and cold. Perfect conditions to stay home and read, listen to music, catch up on sleep, or watch television.

Bean soups, rich stews, and hot toddies are the order of the day. Speaking of orders, restaurant lines are short, even on weekends. Same thing at the movies.

**

January is a terrible month.

Cheeks sting. Eyes tear. Gray skies offer not a wisp of hope. The ocean looks like punishment.

Fish are in hiding. So are their pursuers.

Everyone else has engineered a way to get out of town; we eat the dust in their wake. Bills have never been higher. Taxes loom.

New Year's resolve has liquified as the earth has hardened. Fat advances over the waistband. Car heaters take too long to kick in. Video store shelves are empty. Stores shorten their hours, if they are open at all.

Cats stand inside the door and ask to be let out. Disbelieving, they ask to be let in. The cycle goes on endlessly.

**

January. We would be sad if it never came at all, and will be very glad when it has gone.

CTC Theater Live's riveting production of Irwin Shaw's powerful antiwar play, "Bury the Dead," opened on Friday night at Guild Hall. It was an evening to remember for many reasons, not the least of them the glorious language in the work itself.

Written when the author was 22, with only a few "Dick Tracy" radio scripts to his name, it predates by several years the military service in World War II that would lead to his magnificent war novel "The Young Lions."

Yet it burns with the outrage of a seasoned veteran, not only at the recurring tragedy of men sacrificed to no avail throughout the ages, but also of the women left behind to mourn them.

Angry Playwright

The playwright had originally called his play "Bury Them, They Stink" when he entered it in a New Theater League contest in New York in 1935. By the time it opened at the Ethyl Barrymore a year later, he'd been talked into the less cynical title, but the underlying anger remained.

The director Sandy Rosen, who also staged "Broadway Bound" for CTC last year, brings Mr. Shaw's passion to compelling life.

Against John Zaleski's bleak set of an anonymous battlefield, dramatically lighted by Steven Espach, he presents slides of historic battles, from Egyptian warriors in their crowded friezes, through World War I trenches and Hitler on parade, to the atomic bomb, the stunned Viet- nam wounded, and finally, the swaggering leader of a contemporary girls' street gang.

Unwilling Corpses

This penetrating look at the posturing and pathos of combat leads into the play's opening scene: a death detail at some unnamed front is digging a grave for six stinking corpses.

After blessings from a rabbi (David Parker) and a priest (Robert Anthony), however, the dead stand up in the uniforms of their various armies and refuse to be buried. The drama unfolds as they protest the brutal interruption of their lives.

The military brass (the commanding Mr. Anthony as General One and Mr. Parker as General Two) first try to put down the uprising, then to hush it up.

Finally the Defense Department summons the Gold Star mothers, wives, and sweethearts of the slain, hoping these "conservative" women can persuade them of their patriotic duty to lie down and be buried.

Ordinary Lives

This ploy doesn't work either, but in the brief encounters between the dead men and their loved ones some of Mr. Shaw's most moving writing illuminates the human cost of war.

And here's where the actors' talents shine most impressively, bringing us the sweetness of ordinary lives that should not be sacrificed so arbitrarily.

Private Schelling (Paul Marino) reminisces lyrically to his wife, Bess (Janice Bishop), about their simple life together on a German farm. British Private Levy (Ray Gobes Jr.) confides to his girlfriend, Joan (Helen Mendes), his love of the sound of her high heels, his need to be more than a colored pin on some general's map.

Widows' Memories

There's Julia ((Moira McMahon), roaring drunk in her widow's weeds, horrified as her dead husband, Private Morgan (T.J. Parlette), a poet, exults that at least his hands weren't shot off; he can keep writing.

Katherine Driscoll (Melissa Halfide) searches out poor Tom, her Cockney spouse (Joseph DeSane), to impart her belief in "heaven on earth," not in some afterlife. Private Dean (Patrick Christiano), only 20, is grieved over by his heartbroken mother (Stephanie Brussell).

A riveting production of Irwin Shaw's powerful antiwar play - a rousing antidote to the January blahs.

But it's Martha Webster (Mary Vienneau) who tells it like it is, cheering on her wimp of a husband (Glen Bazazian), whose best memory is of having a beer with the guys in a bar.

"Why wait until you're dead," she says. "It's about time you all stood up. Tell 'em! Tell 'em!"

What Matters Most

The fact that women have been integrated into the army in this production lends it a special poignancy, and there are several impressive female soldiers in the huge cast.

Among them, Andrea Gross, filling in for her mother, Judy Militare, temporarily sidelined by illness, should certainly be cited for a fine performance.

So should Julie Burroughs, Ginger Buquicchio, Katie Meckert, Steve Ford, and Larry Summa, as well as the oddly generic costumes by Chas W. Roeder.

What with the splendid acting of the unforgettable script, and Mr. Rosen's incisive direction, this is a memorable night at the theater. Its subtle blend of solemnity and humor, satire and heartbreak, is a rousing antidote to the January blahs, and a timely reminder of what really matters in life as we head into the millennium.

There's no curtain call; you're left with that desolate battlefield.

AMAGANSETT

Hastings to Ami and Risa Weintraub, Ashwood Court, $187,500.

Gordon to Timothy and Jayne Donahue, Devon Woods Close, $155,000.

O'Neill to Carmine and Lydia Caponigro, Montauk Highway, $365,000.

BRIDGEHAMPTON

Damiecki to H. Joseph Mello, Uncle Leo's Lane, $167,000.

Green River L.P. to Guy and Francesca Reigler, Casey Lane, $157,500.

Hausman to Elliot Matlin, Jennifer Lane, $550,000.

EAST HAMPTON

Schoenfeld to John Werwaiss (trustee), David's Lane, $722,500.

Solomon to Barry and Shelly Adelman, Stirrup Court, $372,500.

Cooper to Lyndon English, Fithian Lane, $185,000.

Tillich estate to Theodore Farris, Woods Lane, $240,000.

Smith to Sandra Ramirez-Arais, Further Lane, $1,800,000.

Emmet to George Doty Jr., Fithian Lane, $490,000.

Ocean Road Assoc. Inc. to Farrell Dev. Co. Inc., Heritage Farm Lane, $180,000.

MONTAUK

Munday to Lyon Fisher and Margaret Keogh, Seaside Avenue, $215,000.

Berkeley Federal Bank to Steven Adler, Dogwood Street, $195,000.

Becker to Kenneth Hart, Hopkins Avenue, $331,500.

NORTH HAVEN

Bohrer (referee) to Michael Logan, Redcoats Lane, $285,000.

NORTHWEST

Dragotta to Jane Desmond, Augie's Path, $485,000.

Braid to Frances Von Lukanovic and Andrea Brown, Grassy Hollow Drive, $165,000.

Silva to Laura Benjamin and Barbara Schwartz, Settlers Landing Road, $207,000.

Cappucci to Anthony and Marie Rao, Settlement Court, $400,000.

NOYAC

Lavin to Dennis Karter and Kevin and William Finnegan, Dumar Drive, $167,000.

Hartwell to Sharon Klein, Wilson Road, $225,000.

SAG HARBOR

Selton estate to Joan Jones and John Condeelis, Harbor Drive, $360,000.

Rodgers to Allan White, West Water Street, $198,000.

Labrozzi to Christine Merser, Archibald Way, $270,000.

SAGAPONACK

Furgatch estate to Richard and Deborah Brennan, Seascape Lane, $860,000.

SPRINGS

Anklam to Zaharo Assoc., Harrison Avenue, $155,000.

Esposito Sr. to Peter Rana Jr., Washington Avenue, $175,000.

WAINSCOTT

Barton to Philippe Bigar, Town Line Road, $325,000.

WATER MILL

Neff to Judith Grandes, Upper Seven Ponds Road, $175,000.

The G&T Dairy Chicken House, owned and operated since the 1940s by the Tillinghast family of East Hampton, will likely be sold to Arthur Seekamp, an owner of Brent's General Store in Amagansett.

Robert and Frank Tillinghast, the owners of the Race Lane, East Hampton, deli, said no money had changed hands yet, but that a contract was in the mail.

A bigger and better deli, along the line of Brent's, is the plan, according to David Winthrop, a Brent's manager. The business will be closed for renovations for about six weeks, he said.

Night Business

Among other things, new salad cases and a steam table will be installed. Mr. Seekamp hopes to attract night-time business, said Mr. Winthrop, and to offer a wide choice of hot meals. The new store will carry many more grocery items, too.

Mr. Seekamp has been asking the brothers about the G&T "for about four years," said Frank Tillinghast, but they were not interested. Now, he said, with his children through college, he "just wants a change."

The Tillinghast family ran a dairy business in the village for many years. They have sold milk at the store since 1942; it was expanded into a deli in the 1970s.

Same Name

Mr. Seekamp, said Mr. Winthrop, "has always wanted to get that place." His partner in another delicatessen, in Woodbury, will join him in this venture as well. The property itself will be leased for now.

One aspect of the business may stay the same - the name. Since most East Hamptoners will continue to call it the Chicken House anyway, Mr. Winthrop said, Mr. Seekamp may just go along. The strategy worked well with Brent's, another neighborhood institution.

The Pink House, a bed and breakfast on James Lane in East Hampton will not expand as its owner, Ronald Steinhilber, had hoped. The Village Zoning Board of Appeals denied Mr. Steinhilber's application for a special permit Friday after a James Lane neighbor, Patricia Handal, expressed "concern" that "sprawl" was created when "people move with good intentions but change the complexion of our little village."

Mr. Steinhilber had hoped to add 825 square feet to the building, including two new guest rooms, and renovate an existing garage.

"Why should we enlarge a pre-existing nonconforming use?" asked James Amaden, a board member.

"That's a bona fide question," answered Joan Denny, another member, adding that she had "questioned this years ago, because B and B's are not rooming houses."

"This is commercial, in my opinion," said Mr. Amaden.

In its decision, the board noted that the expansion could "adversely affect the harmony and character of use in the district."

Fait Accompli

Though noting that it was after the fact, the board did grant a variance to Ruth Mueller to remodel and attach an accessory structure to her house on the Circle to within 3.2 feet of the side yard, where the setback is 10 feet.

The structure already has been connected to the residence, noted Thomas Lawrence, the building inspector.

"Why was the work done first?" asked Mr. Amaden.

Mr. Lawrence said that Donald Bennett, the previous inspector, had interpreted the Village Code to mean that the existing structure would be allowed, and issued a permit.

The applicant needed the Z.B.A. approval to obtain a valid certificate of occupancy.

Icahn Patio

The Z.B.A. spent yet another 20 minutes on Carl Icahn's concrete patio. Mr. Icahn's permit for the patio, which is on an ocean dune fronting his Nichols Lane property, was rescinded a few weeks ago, but the eight-page decision was not ready to be read aloud until Friday.

It cited three public hearings in 1996, including an appeal by Mr. Icahn's neighbor, Nathan Halpern, challenging the original permit.

Michael Walsh of Water Mill, Mr. Icahn's attorney, who has repeatedly requested a rehearing claiming he had new evidence, sat quietly, taking notes.

Mr. Icahn has 90 days to remove the patio. Mr. Walsh said there was "a good chance" he would appeal the ruling.

Mr. Halpern's attorney, William Esseks, of Riverhead, listened to the proceedings without comment from the back of the room.

In other news of the village, the Design Review Board, after many weeks' deliberation, decided on Jan. 8 that David Fink can begin renovating the front of his 83 Main Street property, which has been characterized by its recessed windows and entry.

Turn-Of-The-Century Style

Mr. Fink intends to bring the storefront out to line up with an existing front wall in a "style most closely related to . . . turn-of-the-century Main Street buildings numbers 1 through 81 and 78." His claim that the alteration will not increase the store's gross square footage, which would necessitate a reduction in floor space in the back, will be heard by the Z.B.A.

The D.R.B. will meet again Wednesday at 7 p.m. in Village Hall. The Village Board will meet tomorrow at 11 a.m. in the Emergency Services Building on Cedar Street, when it will conduct a public hearing on a scenic and conservation easement from Peter Wolf, whose property lies on a private road off Briar Patch Road.

I recently read a description of Russian winter wind as "cutting into one's face like a flung handful of ground glass." That's about right.

Cold aside, Moscow's January is brutal. The month hovers, a relentless chalky gray. Slick-iced sidewalks, masquerading as doughy, brown slush, force even nimble ballerina feet into a staccato shuffle.

It is this season, borne like a yoke clear through to May, that turns even the most leather-faced pragmatists into sentimental saps. The sunny TV ad for Wrigley's gum is an evocative masterpiece. Taking off your socks is as sexy as skinny-dipping. Astroturf is intoxicating. Anything, anything that reminds you of summer is a gift.

Country Cottages

Summer here is defined by the dacha, or summer house. To Western ears, it sounds deceptively like that Hamptons specialty, the country home. But Russian dachas are not the exclusive real estate of the rich. Even that screeching babushka who monitors escalator traffic in my metro station has one.

And though it may consist of two miserly, unlighted, unheated, waterless, and toiletless rooms (how I hope it does), it is still called a dacha, and she will probably live there most of the summer. Her raptor stare will soften.

She will dig up potatoes and bulbous beets from her modest garden plot. Her swollen fingers will gently pluck raspberries destined for preserves from her single bush, leaving only the bald white knobs to tease the birds.

Enormous Mansions

But this is the old school. For the ripped-off Soviet pensioners - and there are millions - these dacha routines are not merely bucolic; the food harvested and rubles saved are necessary for survival.

So they continue to toil in their gingerbread cottages, even as bulldozers roar next door, excavating vast swaths for Russia's new "kottegi," the grotesque mansions of Moscow's outrageously rich and the future of the city's outskirts.

These kottegi, looming, often enormous brick and glass structures, are popping up at such a wild clip it makes East End '80s development look as orderly and refined as a Japanese tea ceremony. Highway billboards hawk planned communities. Metal gates with electronic codes are replacing the log benches favored by tipsy town elders. And if you look carefully, sometimes you can spot a turret poking through the birches.

Russia's East Hampton

One popular dacha town, a 45-minute drive from central Moscow, is Russia's East Hampton. In Russian, it's Nikolina Gora, or Nicholas's Hill. The well-paved road out there is remarkable because it's well paved, which can mean only one thing: Expensive cars carrying important people are traveling on it. The road, frequently blocked by President Boris N. Yeltsin's cavalcade of blue-sirened Mercedes-Benzes, passes the headman's apartment building.

Soon, as Stalin-era apartment blocks give way to forest, comes Zhukovka, the stomping ground of Government elite since the dictator's days. To the right is the sprawling new estate of Sergei Filatov, the silver-haired former head of Yeltsin's administration. To the left is a shrouded entrance into the woods that conceals all manner of government dachas, tennis courts, saunas, big-screen TVs, leggy girls.

A sign for Barvikha is never passed without comment. This mysterious village is home to the eponymous sanatorium where Yeltsin convalesces after heart attacks or quintuple bypass surgery.

Gone Gourmet

And all along the way, kottegi. Mostly they are built like Queens, shoulder to shoulder, but for no apparent reason. That the setup is influenced by a notion of zoning is unlikely. Perhaps they are trying to approximate the Soviet-style communal apartment in a rural setting. More likely it is a safety in numbers theory.

A drive to Nikolina Gora is unsatisfying without a stop at the Barefoot Contessa. This tidy outdoor market used to have the charm of Grace's hot- dog stand of old - or at least the Milk Pail - and served the same purpose: a first sniff of the docile country and a well-earned snack after driving so long. Though still run by the same stout, shrill band of vendors, the farmer's market has gone gourmet, and parking amid the all-terrain imports is risky.

Market Spectacle

Besides the perfect tomatoes and cucumbers, you can get blini with meat or cabbage, spicy eggplant with sauce, a roasted chicken, fresh milk, cakes and pickles, and eggs dyed with leaf shapes at Easter - all at twice the city prices. Over the summer, in Dean & Deluca fashion, a bar and restaurant opened. Mountain bikes and wicker furniture sell down the street, near another new, 24-hour store that sells rum with a BMW key chain attached.

One violently rainy day I stopped at the market to buy lunch. I put a few feeble pages from a newspaper on my head and began to haggle for radishes. Into the center of the market, like a horse strolling into your living room, drove a glossy green Jeep Cherokee. The tinted window buzzed down.

A vendor immediately trotted over to the open window with a cake. Another followed with fat peaches. Soon a small, servile crowd formed. Inside I saw a beautiful, languid, black-haired woman. She slowly nodded yes or no as produce was offered through the ad hoc drive-through window, careful not to let her mobile phone or leather pants get wet.

Maybe she was a movie star, or a politician's wife. Like Spielberg sighted on 27 East, she could be headed only one place.

In Come The Coolers

The stately dachas of Nikolina Gora were originally built for academics and scientists. It was a quiet community where Moscow's big thinkers could walk on the wide, hilly banks of the Moscow river. Generations of learned, or at least privileged, wore shallow indentations into the porch steps.

Now their descendants are grumpy but resigned to the yellow and red (foreign and diplomatic) license plates that fill the narrow streets. By necessity they rent out their houses to these comparatively rich newcomers, maybe only for the summer.

Some, journalists mostly, have shares. Others come just for the day, maybe to swim at the beach, formerly called Dip-plyazh, or diplomatic beach, but now open to the masses and their beer coolers.

The Real Thing

A little to the west, where the real intelligentsia stroll, you can sometimes see a guy riding a horse on the other side of the river. Nearby, you are obliged to turn up your nose at the modern dacha rented by the party of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the fascist bad boy of Russian politics. In Russia's East Hampton, only Joey Buttafuoco could be a worse neighbor.

In hushed tones, you also point out the luscious, magical spot where Nikita Mikhalkov shot part of "Burnt by the Sun," the 1995 Academy Award winner for best foreign film.

Of course I spurn Nikolina Gora's glamour. My dacha last summer was the real thing - outhouse, wild apple orchard, and bathtub in the kitchen. Kottegi have not spared my village, but at least, as in Nikolina Gora, construction is rather discreet. Still, they are beginning to block views of the farmland, which we locals find appalling. My village is called Dmitrovskoye, which in English means "Sagaponack."

Sarah Koenig, a former reporter for The East Hampton Star, works for the Moscow bureau of The New York Times.